Mists of Pandaria: All Specs

Please use this thread to discuss Hunters in the Mists of Pandaria expansion. Avoid excessive wish-listing and whining. Constructive criticism is fine. Make sure you are making a useful post. "I like X" is not useful. "I like X because it allows this or that" is useful. Common sense applies, if you're not sure feel free to PM a moderator or administrator. Thanks.

i miss raiding with carebare :< she makes me feel like i am not the only person that hates everyoneAldriana: I am an asshole, it just so happens that some of my colleagues are even *bigger* assholes.[R] [85:Neux:2]: i hear if you die on Good Friday they are going to make it where you can't get rezzed until easter sundayKhazal: Yeah, I don't know about Magic Rainbow Unicorn Land, but here in Reality, Rhyolith is the worst encounter Blizzard has ever designed.

Okay, I'll start the ball rolling with my thoughts on the new talents unveiled - of course there is the caveat that anything and everything can change, but I will assume the latest info to be the way things are (otherwise a discussion will be meaningless).

Talents

Level 15Frozen ArrowsYour arrows and ammunition are chilled with frost, causing your Auto Shot to have a 30% chance to reduce the target's movement speed by 30% for 10 seconds.

Arcane ArrowsYour arrows and amunition are infused with arcane magic, causing your Auto Shot to have a 50% chance to restore 5 focus when it deals damage.

Venom Tipped ArrowsYour arrows and ammunition are mixed with serpent venom, causeing a stacking poison damage over time effect on the target dealing Nature damage. Stacks up to 5 times.

ThoughtsThe first tier of talents seem pretty clear cut, Frozen Arrows is - in end game terms - a kiting talent and the other 2 are dps talents in some capacities. Looking a bit more at Frozen Arrows, it is only autoshots and its a 30% chance. Since the effect lasts 10 seconds you should, rng aside, be able to keep it up 100% as long as you are facing your target, however, unless ranged speed is lowered, it could potentially take up to 10+ seconds to get the effect on the target. My feeling is the proc chance should be upped (40-50%), with a lowering of the duration possibly (6-8 seconds) for reliabilty.Arcane Arrows and Venom Tipped Arrows are a bit harder to quantify without hands-on testing. AA is a focus booster, and thus will boost damage as long as we can utilize the extra focus, while VTA is a direct damage boost - VTA is the talent to pick when focus is no longer an issue from the way it looks.

Level 30Silencing Shot, Wyvern Sting and Intimidation are all the same as today.For end-game purposes, I very much doubt if Intimidation is going to be picked up, a 3 second stun and temporary threat, just doesn't seem useful. That leaves an interrupt and a CC, and I dare say the most useful in an end-game environment will almost certainly be the interrupt, as long as Wyvern Sting has the dot and is non-renewable, we have better and more reliable CC, especially frost trap (more on that later).Overall not much interesting going on here for a raider.

Level 45Posthaste60% movement speed for 4 seconds after we use Disengage.

Evasiveness100% increased chance to dodge attacks and resists spells for 3 seconds after we use disengage.

Exhilaration15% selfheal when landing after a disengage.

ThoughtsPosthaste is an amped up version of the current MM talent, Evasiveness screams PvP, as I doubt anything worth using it on in a raiding environment will be subject to the effect. Exhilaration seems to be the safest choice here, though posthaste can definately have some situational use where moving fast is critical periodically - however unless disengage itself gets an overhaul so we aren't technically left in position until we land, it seems more for soloing than group play.An on demand 15% selfheal every 25 seconds seems very useful.

Level 60Crouching Tiger, Hidden Chimera and Spirit Bond are known quantities with Aspect of the Iron Hawk being new and reducing all direct damage taken by 15%.In a raiding perspective AotIH could have some situational uses in a fight where dps needs to "tank" a damage source - like shards on Baleroc, Burning Orbs on Staghelm or if dps tanking makes a return, like Kiggler the Crazed on the High King Maulgar fight. Outside of this, Spirit Bond seems to be the better option of the 2, and CT,HC is, in reality, useless for a raiding environment.

Level 75Fervor, Readiness and TotH all make a return, and this will probably be the most interesting talent tier for raiders. All 3 talents are the same as we know today (though TotH has been changed slightly to include all focus costing shots of course) and all 3 options are good in different ways. Looking more closely, I don't think Fervor will have much going for it though - not on the current 2 minute CD, seeing as Readiness is only on a 3 minute CD, and will almost definatly provide a bigger boost (or burst) of damage output than fervors 50 focus. The choice most likely comes down to Readiness or TotH, and that is an interesting choice, but along the same lines as the first tier of talents, TotH is based on focus generation, which has a possibility of becoming either a must have or a moot point.

Level 90Flash FreezeYour Freezing Trap no longer has a cooldown, but only one target can be afflicted by it at a time.

Black IceIncreases the movement reduction of your Ice Trap by an additional 10% abd when you move through your Ice Trap you gain 50% movement speed for 4 sec.

Transmorph TrapPlace a nature trap laced with a special toxin that will transmorph the next enemy into a beast, reducing their movement speed by 60% and causing them to be unable to use any of their normal abilities.

ThoughtsThe last tier is all about traps. Not so sexy, but there are som very interesting implications here I think.First lets look at Flash Freeze. On the surface not so interesting, all it does it remove the CD on Freezing Trap, and unless there are habitual trap breakers around, its not very useful - but! The next part of Flash Freeze implies that the restriction of only one trapped target at a time is going away again - if it isn't, this is the one talent presented that I really think should simply be made baseline.Black Ice is also an interesting talent, and can be even more interesting if the move speed bonus applies to all friendly ice traps - which I suspect, as the movement bonus must be handled on the character level, unlike the additional slow which must be handled on the world level. Definately a must have for any kiting situation, between this and the frozen arrows intent, we are very well covered for kiting.Transmorph trap is a whole new trap that looks interesting and les sthan useful at the same time. The trap doesnt state a duration which will be what this trap hinges on. It doesn't look terribly useful for raiding on the surface, but if it works on mob type sthat are hard to get CC on, it makes them the target of other CC options as well (hibernate, sheep and scare beast come to mind), however if it doesn't work on these types of mob it is more or less a PvP option.

To sum up, I think the talents look okay, some tweaks needed (naturally). The talents most in need of tweaking, from my chair, is Fervor (if not outright scrapped / made baseline and replaced), Wyvern Sting and Frozen Arrows. Wyvern Sting and Frozen Arrows are good options, but they are just a bit too unreliable - Wyvern sting I would like to see as a sustainable CC option (reduce to just below 30 sec CD to be renewable without triggering the dot, or make it clear its own dot specifically) - and Frozen Arrows are a bit to rng in getting up, so as I said in the beginning, I would rather see a reduced effect time and an increased proc chance.

Has blizzard given anything concrete on how you will be able to swap talents? Someone told me they said it would be similar to changing glyphs (ie, you can do it anywhere as long as you're out of combat), which would be great, but I don't want to get my hopes up.

I think you have to sort of have to guess at blizzard's intentions with some of these talents and figure out where balance will eventually end up. Like on the first tier, I'm guessing they want VTA to be strong enough that it's better on a single target when you can stack it up, but weaker than arcane arrows otherwise.

Nooska, when you talk about spirit bond are you taking into account the changed version? It heals twice as fast now (2% every 5 instead of 10 seconds) but the increased healing received is gone. For standard raiding purposes it looks to me like iron hawk will be the stronger choice, especially since without glyph of raptor strike (unless they work the 20% DR into some other ability I guess) hunters don't have any other % damage reduction abilities or passive traits, which is fairly unusual.

The disengage tier is one of my favorites. When I first read evasiveness I thought it sounded like some kind of "disengage of shadows" deal without the debuff removal, but after rechecking the tooltip for cloak of shadows (which specifically says it grants immunity to effects) and realizing that even without the debuff clearing part, having the immunity effect on a ~25 second cooldown is probably too strong, it seems more likely that it won't be that effective in PVE. Even so, posthate and exhilaration are solid options.

I agree that fervor is likely to see a change. The cooldown is too long and the effect too small to ever be worthwhile over readiness or thrill of the hunt. I'm also a little disappointed with the level 90 talents having minimal effect on raiding in most cases. Black Ice is probably the best by default since I can't even remember the last time I used freezing trap on a boss and transmorph seems no more usable, but in most boss fights where you aren't kiting and just want it for the movement speed there just isn't a way to trigger the trap. So, just 1 very non-excessive little wish: considering some of the power of the other level 90 talents out there, maybe they could allow us to manually trigger ice trap. I'm sure there will be plenty of changes before MoP actually goes live, but overall I'm pretty happy with how things look.

Nooska, your initial analysis is not surprisingly well written, so I'll simply add my thoughts to it, rather than restate. As I understand it, a stated goal for the new talents is that there's no "bad" talents. Thus, the current talents seem to be more situational, and not as simple as pve vs pvp, though some tiers certainly argue as much.

Level 15Frozen ArrowsI have nothing to add on effectiveness, but rather purpose. Seeing this along with the later trap talent makes me hopeful that we'll see a resurgence of kiting, since the mechanic started being downplayed as far back as BC. Any kiting now is far more likely to be given to a frost mage or dk. I would personally welcome us regaining our spot as top kiters, as it provided gameplay variety as opposed to simply pumping out damage.

Arcane ArrowsAs we've seen, there can and have been issues of focus capping, (which leads me to think Blizzard might adjust the model slightly) in which case AA becomes almost useless. For MM, coupled with Rapid Recuperation, the problem is even more pronounced. Thus, I suggest that AA will be more our choice for fights involving mid to heavy aoe, target swapping, or those frequently requiring extra shots such as Tranq. Arguably, we could simply save up enough AA focus refunds to power single target shots as well, but I don't anticipate them completely abandoning Steady/Cobra granting focus.

Venom Tipped ArrowsSince this has a ramp up, it's fairly obvious that it will see its best use on sustained single target.

Level 45Intimidation, unless reworked, seems like it will be relegated to a pvp talent, though I'm not fully clear on its effective usage. I haven't extensively pvped as BM to see how it currently feels, but doesn't it suffer the same basic problem as Kill Command? IE, if the pet doesn't reach the target by the time the buff expires, too bad?

Level 60Going by past raiding, I'd almost certainly pick Iron Hawk, as we are relatively very poor in defense. Consider that our health pools can be around 150k now (rounding for nice numbers), 2% is only 3k. Even every five seconds, that won't keep up with any raid wide damage, and becomes nearly useless in the absence of such.

All in all, I'm not completely sold on the system yet, but I'm very interested to see the iterations it undergoes.

Hey guys, I heard that Blizzard puts out these things called "patches" that contain "content"

I find it interesting that the level 90 talents all seemed to be based around PvP or Dungeon PvE. The reason I say this is because raid bosses are currently immune to our traps, so unless there are more bosses with adds (compared to a normal raid tier: T11 = ODS, Magmaw, Nef, Cho'gall [4/12] and T12 = Beth [1/7]) then these talents are pretty much worthless.

Well, with the new "endgame" options such as challenges and scenarios, there will be PVE situations where the level 90 trap talents are useful; maybe blizzard designed them with the purpose in mind that they wouldn't be very useful in traditional raids but would be more potent for those other options. Whether or not those other types of content end up mattering to the endgame raiding scene is something we'll just have to wait and see about.

I find it interesting that the level 90 talents all seemed to be based around PvP or Dungeon PvE. The reason I say this is because raid bosses are currently immune to our traps, so unless there are more bosses with adds (compared to a normal raid tier: T11 = ODS, Magmaw, Nef, Cho'gall [4/12] and T12 = Beth [1/7]) then these talents are pretty much worthless.

Most of the talents in our talent tree are geared towards pvp, or are "defensive," type talents. Along with most other classes talents as well.

Nooska, when you talk about spirit bond are you taking into account the changed version? It heals twice as fast now (2% every 5 instead of 10 seconds) but the increased healing received is gone. For standard raiding purposes it looks to me like iron hawk will be the stronger choice, especially since without glyph of raptor strike (unless they work the 20% DR into some other ability I guess) hunters don't have any other % damage reduction abilities or passive traits, which is fairly unusual.

No actually, I didn't notice that part (shame on me), I don't really know what my excuse is. I still stand by my original thoughts on it though, seeing as Iron Hawk only diminishes Direct Damage - last I checked, direct damage is only singletarget damage with you as the target. If it has changed (or I am misremembering) or IH is badly worded, then I agree, that a 15% DR is superior to 2% healthgain every 5 seconds - especially with Exhilaration.

I'm not personally worried about the usefulness or uselesness of the level 90 talents, today we also have some talents that are not very useful most of the time, but are really really awesome at just that moment - I agree that there is an indication of the return of kiting, and with that, perhaps, also CC - I'm thinking SSC style where you really want CC. Its better now than it was in wrath, but I'm hoping we get more use out of CC abilities in raids as well.

Having spent a long time looking through all classes' talents, the Hunter set seems particularly underdeveloped to me at the moment. There are quite a few choices in there that seem unlikely to be chosen by any PvEing hunter, ever, meaning several of the tiers have effectively 2 choices and not 3. (which is arguably worse than all 3 talents having limited/situational raid use)

As an example, Fervor feels like it will always lose out to Readiness, meaning Fervor is a classic decoy talent in the same way that 2/2 Serpent Spread is today.

Evasiveness is another example. If it doesn't work on raid mechanics, then it's a decoy talent for all raiders. If it does work then it has the potential to trivialize encounters. If it works some of the time then if feels cryptic/broken.

The top tier is also potentially too PvP oriented: without trap friendly encounters you can imagine the top talents being unused. That's not a disaster of course, but as top talents it stands out as odd when compared to the top talents of Rogues, Warriors, DKs. A potential fix for this might be to alter the trap talents to somehow assist raid members. For example if Black Ice increased the speed of all raid members passing through it. Or perhaps a trap talent that worked a bit like an offensive Spirit Link totem, leveling the health of all affected mobs.

Having said all that I do very much like this new system and I look forwards to seeing how the hunter talents evolve.

Has blizzard given anything concrete on how you will be able to swap talents? Someone told me they said it would be similar to changing glyphs (ie, you can do it anywhere as long as you're out of combat), which would be great, but I don't want to get my hopes up.

Yes Ghostcrawler stated during the Q&A that you be able to swap them out on a fight by fight basis like a gylph. He did not go into detail as to how / what we would need to do that (such as Dust of Disappearance, etc.) but did state we would be able to.

Edit: Supporting Statements - "The choice comes, hopefully, from choosing talents that appeal to how you like to play or what you think would be particularly useful for a specific boss, fight, or encounter, and the ability to swap around points freely while out in the world help reinforce that." from The new talent system will fail, miserably. - MMO-Champion BlueTracker

I saw that on the Q&A last night too, and was very pleased. I'm also glad they mentioned prime glyphs as potentially in the same boat as the old talent system since the choices are almost entirely based on making the correct number assumptions rather than utility (except in a few cases where they impart a change with too much utility or too spec-defining to be a major glyph such as howling blast applying frost fever for DKs or being able to move while casting lightning bolt for elemental shaman, but in those cases it's just as easy to make that necessary utility baseline). For most classes major glyphs are really in the sweet spot when it comes to swapping in different utility for different things; a paradigm which I think is engaging and makes a lot of sense, so modeling the new talent system after them seems like a winner.

What I took from the presentation on this, and I can't stress enough this is MY interpretation, is this. Talent trees were intended to be a way for players to express some individuality but they never ended up that way. As we all know, from the start they ended being a cookie cutter of 'best dps'. This allows them to build 95% 'best dps' into the baseline (at least as far as talents go) and allows us to choose the new talents based on individualism as well as situational needs. It allows them to make the talents much closer to what they intended them to be.

Hopefully they will be able to do that, I think a lot of it remains to be seen but personally I am looking forward to this new change and how it will play out.

FA - To me this seems a rather lackluster talent to improve the value of this talent they will either need to remove concussive shot, have it apply to all shots rather than autoshot, or as Nooska said upping the proc rate. Concussive shot to me just has more control that this talent will ever have, along with the glyph.

AA - This is a very interesting talent, especially for PVP where the gain of focus is especially hard. This also has some interesting implications with haste effects.

VTA - Without any idea as to the scaling of the damage component of this it is a little hard to say how good this will be. I will point out something very interesting though, this will be a nice way to put dots on targets, and it is applied via all shots including abilities like multi-shot from the wording. So this has the potential to be an impressive talent.

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Level 30

SiS - Honestly being able to reliably interrupt in my opinion is such a major ability that I pretty much discount the two other abilities in this tier. Wyvern sting as Nooska put it is unreliable due to the dot effect and can be dispelled. Also since this is a talent will Noxious Stings still be around? Intimidation, an excellent pvp talent, but it really does not compare with silencing shot, three times a minute compare to intimidation's once.

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Level 45

I differ in my point of view with nooska.

Posthaste is nice, but really I don't think much of it even now, only picking it up for the Rapid fire reduction effect.

Evasiveness, to me this could be an impressive PVE talent along with PVP talent, being able to 100% resist spell effects on a known timer could help keep a hunter alive. Not to mention disengage, resist Death Grip anyone???

Exhilaration, yeah this sounds nice, but sounds kind of stupid. I've got to use one of my defensive cooldown to get a mere 15% of my health back. This is more powerful than Spirit Bond, I am just biased against this ability. To me it just doesn't fit my image of a hunter.

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Level 60

I 100% agree with nooska. There aren't very many direct damage sources in raiding, but in pvp iron hawk could be useful. However in the long term pvp fight spirit bond will beat it out. CT,HC rarely ever proc in PVE raiding. However, CT,HC with Exhilaration could have some important ramifications for pvp.

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Level 75

Fervor is seriously underpowered compared to readiness and TotH. This only gets worse if for example the hunter has Arcane Arrows, since more focus depleting shots are going to be fired, and the potential to pick up focus returns increase as a result. I am looking forward to having rapid fire, bestial wrath and then popping readiness to get them back. This could give BM a serious amount of burst for a short period of time.

A little napkin math which highlights how bad Fervor is compared to say the standard MM rotation with TotH:

1.8 chimera shots and 4.5 arcane shots on average will return focus for a total of 178.2 focus on average returned in a two minute period. This would be worse if glyphed for Chimera shot and Arcane Arrows (level 15 talent) is taken, and we aren't 100% sure Efficiency is still going to be around.

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Level 90

I must admit to being rather disappointed with the level 90 tier. Freezing trap not having a cooldown, is a little lackluster, although in situations where the mob missed running into the trap you laid down, being able to place it down again is somewhat useful. However the problems inherent with trapping are still around.

Black Ice - a pretty excellent pvp talent, and has almost ... almost no pve value at all.

Transmorph trap - according to the wording this looks like it will b e on the same cooldown as snake traps. However the rest of the wording is so vague I'm not able to interpret as to whether this is a good idea or not.

A lot of people are operating under the assumption that, because of the wording, Transmorph Trap will allow them to CC a mob through the trap and then, before it ends, Scare Beast into additional CC. Right now, we can't use Scare Beast on a Polyed target and can't use it on a target that has been hexxed. I'm highly sceptical that Blizz would change the rules and allow us to do so.

As Namurus said, I'm very disappointed in the last tier. More trap mechanics when, for the past 7 years, traps have been highly unreliable. Furthermore, it feels like tehy're adding more non-Hunterish flavor to our traps (personal opinion here). I'd be happy with a full revamp of our traps, first and foremost, before they go adding anything additional.

A lot of people are operating under the assumption that, because of the wording, Transmorph Trap will allow them to CC a mob through the trap and then, before it ends, Scare Beast into additional CC. Right now, we can't use Scare Beast on a Polyed target and can't use it on a target that has been hexxed. I'm highly sceptical that Blizz would change the rules and allow us to do so.

Neither hex nor polymorph changes the creature type ("turns the target into a frog/sheep" respectively), while the wording on the trap specifically says beast, a creature type, and not a specific beast. Granted that could be either a placeholder or a random beast, but the wording differs significantly from polymorph and hex at this time.

Frostheim mentioned in a blog post that at blizzcon he asked Ghostcrawler if they had accounted for a hunter being able to do something like ice trap one target, wyvern sting another, transmorph trap another, scatter shot a 4th, then hit readiness and do it again, and that's without trying the scare beast. Ghostcrawler reportedly responded that could be a problem. Of course you'd have to give up a lot of stuff to get all those abilities, but it does seem like the kind of situation blizzard does not want to let pan out.

It feels like transmorph trap is one of those mechanics they think will be interesting and they want to make happen in some way, but I wouldn't expect to get EVEN MORE crowd control out of it from scare beast, assuming it ever makes it live as another separate form of CC to begin with.

On the first tier of talents, it seems to me that VTA will be mandatory for any fights requiring any AoE, as the way it is worded, should proc from all attacks. (Possibly Serpent Spread 2.0, or more likely Deadly Poison being pushed off from Rogues to Hunters.)

Also, on CT,HC: Many bosses have an AoE pulse, and *should* trigger the Deterrence portion of this talent. I am not completely certain on the current incarnation of this talent's function in this regard, and will try to find some time to test this out on Twin Valkyrs.

A lot of people are operating under the assumption that, because of the wording, Transmorph Trap will allow them to CC a mob through the trap and then, before it ends, Scare Beast into additional CC. Right now, we can't use Scare Beast on a Polyed target and can't use it on a target that has been hexxed. I'm highly sceptical that Blizz would change the rules and allow us to do so.

As Namurus said, I'm very disappointed in the last tier. More trap mechanics when, for the past 7 years, traps have been highly unreliable. Furthermore, it feels like tehy're adding more non-Hunterish flavor to our traps (personal opinion here). I'd be happy with a full revamp of our traps, first and foremost, before they go adding anything additional.

Neither hex nor polymorph changes the creature type ("turns the target into a frog/sheep" respectively), while the wording on the trap specifically says beast, a creature type, and not a specific beast. Granted that could be either a placeholder or a random beast, but the wording differs significantly from polymorph and hex at this time.

This is very true, Nooska. But you're operating under the assumping that it would work that way. Right now, we've got a 50/50 chance of either of us being right. I just can't see them allowing that to happen, though. Opens up a major can of worms from the stand point of balance amongst the classes (you'll hear people screaming all over the place) and just from the fact that you'd be able to CC a single target almost indefinitely. We don't need more ways to CC, we need better and more pheasable ways to do so.